Nathaniel Hendrix

I also learned from this that IHME gave the editor of The Lancet, where they publish most of their big studies, a $100k prize.

Beyond Fraud: How IHME Distorts Academic Metrics Dr. Ilya Kashnitsky is a demographer @ Statistics Denmark.

IHME has just published their latest Global Burden of Disease study in the Lancet with *2,779* listed authors. This piece describes how their very loose authorship criteria distort metrics and artificially inflate contributors’ citation counts:

Donna Haraway: “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”

The lineup looks incredible. Sad that I won't be able to go!

Happy New Claude Day to those who celebrate

A human approaches a woman at her desk and says hello in Chinese. She says, “Aww, you’re sentient.” A computer approaches the same woman and says hello in Chinese. She looks panicked, picks up her phone, and says, “Hello, John Searle?!”

A favorite John Searle meme, in his memory

Research active faculty teach classes that are significantly closer to the knowledge frontier.

Spooky is scary + camp.

Kind of like how Burke defined the sublime is viewing danger from a place of safety, spooky is further neutralizing danger so that it doesn't produce awe, but rather feelings like coziness, nostalgia, and a sense of being in on the joke.

There should be a moratorium on calling for "systemic change" unless the person calling for it can plausibly prove that they know how to change systems. Which would of course involve answering the question of why they haven't just changed the system already.

A Lifetime of Systems Thinking - The Systems Thinker hen one reaches 80, one is considered to be ripe and ready for picking. Picking usually consists of the pickers asking the pickee to reflect back on the wisdom he has gained over his lifetime. This re...

Russell Ackoff: “The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers.”

We’re ready

Ian Leslie on Being Human in the Age of AI - Econlib When OpenAI launched its conversational chatbot this past November, author Ian Leslie was struck by the humanness of the computer’s dialogue. Then he realized that he had it exactly backward: In an ag...

"It's more and more perilous to be generic in any way--to be a generic writer, or to be a generic person, a generic thinker. Because the machines are very good at analyzing [generic models]. There will be a much *higher* premium on cultivating your own distinctive, inimitable voice."

“[T]here is no love after marriage. It's just that marriage is caused by love. And I think most people do not wanna say that. They don't wanna say that there's only a causal link between the thing Taylor Swift is talking about and the thing you're supposed to feel during marriage.”

So good.

Taylor Swift's Engagement – from Minds Almost Meeting by Robin Hanson and Agnes Callard Audio player and transcript for 'Taylor Swift's Engagement' from Minds Almost Meeting. Agnes and Robin talk, try to connect, often fail, but sometimes don't.

Podcast on how Taylor Swift’s engagement represents a crisis for both her songwriting and the popular conception of how love relates to marriage.

How is Paramount+ involved in this? It's not owned by Disney, right?

nihilism is cowardice.

After lagging far behind, NIH now seems on pace to spend its entire $47 billion budget by Sept. 30 A frenzy of grantmaking in August has the NIH seemingly on pace to spend its entire $47 billion budget by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30

From this (paywalled) article:

A chart showing value of NIH grants over calendar months by year. The 2025 level initially lagged far below previous years, but has now caught up to the average.

A little bit of good news: NIH has caught up with previous years' funding levels. Their staff deserves tremendous respect.

"The closed society represented a perennial moral possibility, whose roots are found in every human soul. In its most common expression, the closed society levels a familiar accusation: that the open society is immoral because it jeopardizes the very possibility of living a virtuous life."

I mean, the safety data strongly suggests that their system is already superior to human drivers. If you have reason to believe that they’re hiding safety events from regulators/investors/the public, though, you should share that widely.

And I think the problems of automated driving systems are a lot easier to solve than the problems of human drivers. Waymo can fix their cars' response to emergency vehicles with a software update. How do you fix humans who won't look for pedestrians when they're driving in cities?

Sure, human-driven cars should become a lot more automated too. I just see it as pretty obvious that a non-fatiguable robot with extra senses is going to outperform humans who speed while changing lanes and sending text messages.

Before you ask, this is adjusted for road type.

Text from Waymo's safety report: "91% fewer serious injury or worse crashes. 79% fewer airbag deployment crashes. 80% fewer injury-causing crashes. 92% fewer pedestrian crashes with injuries. 78% fewer cyclist crashes with injuries. 89% fewer motorcycle crashes with injuries."

Waymo data from 95M miles finds an 80% reduction in injurious crashes and, esp. noteworthy, a 92% reduction in pedestrian injuries.

There should be some real moral urgency behind the wide-spread implementation of self-driving cars (and I mean good systems like Waymo's, not Tesla's FSD).

Like we just use multiples more than we use fractions in conversation?

It seems like people are increasingly using multiplication to indicate a magnitude of diminution: like “20 times smaller than” our “15 times less than”.

Isn’t that what we have fractions for? “One twentieth the size” and “one fifteenth of” are so much cleaner.

A Threads post stating that the PetSmart point has a stronger exchange rate to the US dollar than the Argentine peso (9,794 points = $18)

Let the PetSmart point float!

Two tuxedo cats and a gray and white cow cat look expectantly at the viewer. They are spaced far apart because they all loathe each other. There is a small, cat-sized couch in the foreground.

Cat tax, in case you’re curious

Scientists pioneer ‘animal internet’ with dog phones and touchscreens for parrots Glasgow university researcher aims to ‘fundamentally reshape how animals implement control over their environment’

I think my cats would call each other just to hiss and then hang up.

The New Vertigo Years At the start of the 20th century, the world felt anxious and unsettled much like today

“As philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, the current media environment is like a ‘dictatorship of emotion’ in its ability to torrentially stir up energy and then dissipate practically overnight.”